Message that hard drive is full when clearly it is not!!!! HELP!!!

This is weird. Got a message that I had 117 mb left on hard drive. Dumped a bunch of programs and pictures. Then it said I had 25 gb on drive. Three days later, having done NOTHING, I got a message I was totally out of hard drive space again. Dumped a couple of programs - back up to 1.84 gb. An hour later it is full FULL AGAIN. I had done NOTHING. What is going on here??? My user folder says I have no space when I go to "get info" but when I check "get info" on all the folders inside (system, library, pictures, music, etc) it only adds up to half of the capacity of my hard drive (250 gbs). So in fact I know I only have less than 100 gb on that computer This is very strange. The drive is not full, and when I dump programs and data, it fills itself back up but can't find out why/how/where. I threw out the finder preferences but that didn't work. I booted up from my Leopard disk and it said my hard drive was full, but I KNOW it is not. What is going on??

Sounds like something is generating garbage. You've got a couple of options (at least) to track it down, starting with one tool built into the command-line interface. Pop open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Termain.app) and type in the following:
cd /
sudo du -hd 1
Enter your password when prompted. du is the Disk Usage command, which will print out the disk space taken up by each folder, including invisible ones. Note that du can take a fair bit of time to complete; my own drive took about 5-6 minutes with only 27GB on it, so yours will probably take longer.
Your other option is to grab Disk Inventory X, a freeware utility which performs a very similar job to du, but with a shiny user interface to help you locate the offending space waster. If you're not comfortable with the terminal, this may be the best place to start.

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